How to crowdsource ideas

Crowdfunding is a great way to generate money and interest in your small business idea but sometimes you want ideas and content more than investment. Getting that isn’t a straightforward process so crowdsourcing can help. Those who haven’t done it before will need to know how to crowdsource ideas.

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Crowdsourcing ideas

Rather than simply hoping to generate revenue for your business as crowdfunding does, you can use crowdsourcing to generate ideas. You can crowdsource ideas through contests, by asking users to vote or through various other online interactions. Using the crowd can give you a quick answer to the nagging question: Is my idea any good?

Customers

Crowdsourcing ideas can make the crowd feel like they’re more than simply potential customers. It’s a way of engaging them before you launch your product but there are things you should be aware of if you’re thinking of doing this. First of all, crowdsourcing ideas will leave you with a lot of data to sift through. Do you have the time to do that when you’re trying to start up a business? The other major concern is that you could be putting important business decisions in the hands of your customers. Is that something you really want to do given that customers don’t know the market as well as you do?

Sites to use

We recommend that you take a look at these two major crowdsourcing/crowdfunding sites: indiegogo.com and kickstarter.com. As crowdfunding/crowdsourcing continues to develop you might find that other sites become more popular. To check out which sites are currently offering the most traffic head to crowdfunding.com which ranks the top 10 sites on a list that’s updated daily.

Final word

By building an online community through a crowdsourcing site you can make people care about the product. Only then can you get the sort of feedback that will help you push your firm in the right direction.